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Sixty older adults took the same 15-minute walk once a week for eight weeks. Half were told to look for awe, and only that half reported growing joy, gratitude and compassion (Sturm et al., Emotion, 2022, University of California, San Francisco). An awe walk is an ordinary walk with one added instruction: hunt for something vast or new, and stay with it.
What counts as awe?
Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (2003, Cognition and Emotion) defined it by two appraisals: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, meaning the thing doesn’t fit what you already expected. A cathedral ceiling qualifies. So does a spider web with dew on it, if you really look.
What did the UCSF walkers do differently?
The awe group was coached to notice vastness, to take on a childhood sense of wonder, and to pick somewhere new. Everyone took a selfie at the start, middle and end of each walk. Over the weeks the awe walkers shrank in the frame, letting the scenery take over, and their smiles grew broader. The control walkers did not show that shift.
Why would a walk make a week feel bigger?
Rudd, Vohs and Aaker (2012, Psychological Science) ran three experiments in which people who felt awe reported having more time available, were less impatient, and preferred experiences over products. Awe seemed to work by pulling people into the present moment.
Flat weeks often feel that way because nothing stands out in memory. Fifteen minutes of real attention gives the week a landmark, and it costs nothing. This fits the argument in boredom as a signal worth following: the fix is often attention, not another purchase. A different route to the same feeling is the old flâneur’s walk, which swaps awe for deliberate aimlessness in your own neighbourhood.
How do you take an awe walk?
Go somewhere a little new, look for something vast, look longer than feels normal, and keep the phone in your pocket. Each step is easy to skip, so the walk needs a fixed place in your week. Mornings work well because nothing has gone wrong yet. Daylight helps too, and what morning light does for wakefulness is its own reason to be outside early.
The trouble with a morning walk is that it starts with getting up. DontSnooze can help there, and only there: when the alarm rings you have 30 seconds to record a video, or a random camera-roll photo goes to friends you picked (how it works). It won’t get you to look up once you’re outside.
What are the limits of the evidence?
The UCSF trial was small, and it studied older adults. Rudd’s experiments were short lab studies, not weekly walks. Nobody has shown that an awe walk cures a dull life. What the studies support is narrower and easier to test: fifteen minutes of deliberate looking can change how a week feels.
Walking with a friend and pointing at the same thing is worth trying too, given the chocolate-tasting study on shared experience.
Try it once, on a Tuesday, and notice which moment you’d tell someone about later.